The impact of voter ID laws on turnout and political engagement: An International Study

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This research seeks to develop our understanding of how voter identification laws affect voter turnout and people's attitudes towards electoral integrity both at the aggregate and individual level. Much of what we currently know about this topic comes from literature on the USA. Furthermore, the literature lacks a consensus on the effect that laws have. This research will expand the narrow literature and address the debate within it. I will build on this work by analysing a wide number of democratic countries, with repeated observations over time at both the country and individual level. This research will contain three core themes: 1. The relationship between current laws and turnout 2. The effect that a change in law has on turnout and attitudes 4 / 15 3. How people's attitudes are shaped by laws over-time These will help to guide and focus a series of inter-related research questions, which will use a mixed methods approach since large-N and case studies will be combined thus creating a nested design. The research will address three main questions: 1. What impact do voter identification laws have on turnout and political engagement? Is it always negative? How does this effect vary across different groups of voters, for example ethnic minorities and young people? How does this effect vary depending on the type of law implemented? 2. How does the impact of new voter identification laws on turnout vary over time? Do new laws have a short-term or a long-term impact on turnout? How does this depend on how strict laws are? 3. What are the motivations for the introduction of these laws? Is it merely fraud prevention or is it used by actors to consolidate their power by shaping the electorate? This project is innovative as it seeks to apply advanced quantitative methods, in terms of the analytical techniques used, to an issue which does not enjoy the attention it deserves. Within the United Kingdom at the moment the issue of identification laws is being highly debated as the government carry out pilot schemes. This project matters because it will be able to better inform the debate within and outside the UK and move the debate away from the use of anecdote and towards single case studies combined with large-N studies across the world where nuance and comparison can be made. This will be achieved through creating a database of the voter identification laws used in each country, or region (if it is a devolved policy), combined with the aggregate level of turnout in elections over a series of election cycles, which will focus on parliamentary elections. This will also be supplemented with individual level data on turnout, trust and electoral integrity. This data will be taken from pre-existing cross-sectional and panel international and national surveys, which sample voters and experts in the field of electoral integrity. This will be done in order to establish if there are any causal links between voter identification laws and electoral participation and attitudes towards government and democracy. In addition, this project will aim to have a conceptual impact and address the ESRC priority of 'trust and global governance in a turbulent age' by developing the understanding of how voter identification laws and policies impact election turnout and political engagement with the intention to re-framing the debate which is informed by a diverse and wide range of data. Having already begun to address some of the research questions in my undergraduate dissertation I am confident that this project is feasible within the time frame of a PhD and it will make an original contribution the literature. I believe I am the right person to do this due to my strong quantitative skills, which I intend to build upon throughout the Master's and PhD programmes, and passion for issues of how people access the ballot box and what laws shape this access. This will be achieved by firstly expanding my knowledge of the current literature, secondly by completing t